Hope you are all well. I tried mint 13 a few years back when I first got my 2nd laptop off a junkie for 20 quid down 'a market. Had a few pops at the terminal- visualise Dustin Hoffmann's fire alarm scene from Rainman, without the numeracy skills- and arranged some form of illigitemate pirate window for the unit before it all made me mentally chunder.

Since then I have been collecting disowned desktops from the refuse middens around the local estates (I live in the Port Moresby of south London uk) and have just completed my first build of what is essentially a salvaged dell dimension 5150 circa 1856 AD. It came from under a bush without hard drive or ram, but seems in okay shape- from what I can gather.

I put in a stick o scavenged 2 gig and a double of 512mb after a few sessions without the monitor working and some morse beeper decoding. I've got a Jiffy bag full of redundant memory and (more importantly) another spare pair o ddr2 512, if anyone thinks that would run smoother than the 2gb stick. The bios is reading 3gb, so it is being recognised even if it might not be configured well- suggestions welcome.

Next on the gutter build I have a recycled Sata raid card, which I have loaded 2x160gb hdd onto- one from a wrecked hospitality till, one stripped from a random dump desktop box- surprisingly they match . This configuration has mint 18 Sarah cinnamon impressed on it in a cack handed sort of way that I had hoped would magically become raid zero. But.......... I can't as yet claim that the magic has worked. That said........... I can't really claim that it hasn't worked either.

What I have worked out is that this kind of thing is well beyond my skill set; especially the dread command line, so I have moved sideways into connecting a 50p charity shop web cam (tick) and then I dove deep into some preliminary editorial experiments with kdenlive (bellyflop). There is no audio from the monitor speakers as yet- a rubbish recovered hp1730 that's scratched up nicely, I would like, in time, to get a few more screens up if possible- there is at least one waiting in the wings. Keyboard and mouse, curtesy of rudimentary dumpster diving, both rumbling along nicely, thank you very much!

The final piece of hardware that I hope to install into this rat rig is an ATI? video card that I am trying to rebuild with a customised Xbox cpu heat sink and one of any number of old fans that are part of the support bucket that I have been filling since abandoning Linux a few years back. It looks like it has been thrown from a vehicle at speed, then run over, but bios recognises it as a video card so that's one foot in the right direction- by my dead reckonin'.

The system runs super slow and exhibits amongst other things, bits and pieces of Windows xp, which I thought I had over ridden, but, I hope I can squeeze a batch of 720s out of it before I have a good and proper fry up. I fully appreciate that the project has a low end aesthetic that will not be to everyone's tastes, to say the least, but it was either this or slayin laptop no3:- Tha Toshiba Satellite 210CT

..........booooOOOOOOOMMmmmmm..........

Consider yourselves lucky biotches!

My immediate goals are to get this whip to run the best I can get it to, given the limitations of the trash that I have assembled, familiarise myself better with video production- via the medium of kdenlive-using the system and gain a beginners level comprehension of Linux/terminal in the process.

So far all my forays into terminal have been failures, I have gone through the bios options on the dell and only raid1 is available there. Now that I have the raid card installed I am hoping to connive raid 0 out of that and some mint. Linux doesn't seem to be too sympathetic to this approach, so, rather than jumping in at "how to install raid 0 in Linux" perhaps someone can suggest a better place to start researching so that I don't drown immediately at splash down.

Anyway...

I have really enjoyed the success that I have had so far with the project and look forward to less concentration headaches and more e waste victories.

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.

Welcome to Linux Mint, and the Mint forum.
You say you are having a bit of trouble with the CLI, what helped me was to bookmark this https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/244 and refer to it often, until I got the hang of it. Maybe it will help you as well.

It might take a while; to download and digest some or any of the info. In the mean time I am christening the project Fran after Fran Blanche a pioneer of computer archeology whom I watch on youtube and "Cranky Frank" a heavily modified FJ Holden Utility made famous by his appearance in mad max- fury road.

Fran is rolling this message out pretty smooth at the moment, so we are not in as dire a position as we have been. Still. Lots of things to straighten out before I start out on the 720s in any serious way. I am thinking that I could build in some external memory to help the system along but fundamentally the dell motherboard is always going to be the bottle neck. If I understand things correctly?

Any comments on the build so far would be helpful.

That said- is it possible to tune linux and kdenlive into a stable enough mash so that it might help up-fuel my system into something better paced? A kind of racing alcohol type concoction with nitro boosts? Just a thought, I know its all well outta my reach at the moment but the concept might have a longer term field of interest for me. Would love to hear about any of that sort of thing.

While I understand what you are "trying" to say, you clearly don't know my mother!!!
You're inciting language that would make your eyes bleed.
Best leave her out of it and I wont bring any more "bad words" to the table.

And thanks everyone for the helpful pointers, I am taking it really slow at the mo, but am lovin the forum. It's great to get so much feedback. Just to set the record straight and introduce myself a little better- I am not much of a Brit really, more of an Australian..... or mongrel of the realm. I've been living in London uk for the last 12 years, but still consider myself a colonial. Fran and I share a similarly murky ancestry and class pedigree.